Bare Marriage

Episode 279: Saving Face: Finding My Self, God, and One Another Outside a Defaced Church (feat. Aimee Byrd)

• Sheila Gregoire • Season 8 • Episode 279

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What if vulnerability and authenticity are vital for true community? And what if we can never truly know God, and each other, until we know ourselves? It's episode 279 of the Bare Marriage podcast, featuring Aimee Byrd talking about her new book!


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Sheila: What does healthy Christian community look like?  And what are we missing?  If you’re someone as we go into Holy Week who is saying, “I just want to be excited about going to church.  I want to feel known.  I want to feel like when I go people know who I am, and they’re excited to see me.  And I’m excited to see them, what are the missing ingredients that are stopping us from getting there?  That’s the conversation we’re going to have today on the Bare Marriage podcast.  Hi.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And today one of my favorite people—she is so brave.  Aimee Byrd is going to be joining us talking about her book, Saving Face.  And before we bring her on, I want to say a thank you to our community that makes my life wonderful on the Internet.  And that’s our patreons, who support us for as little as $5 a month.  Sometimes a little bit more.  And that gets them access to our wonderful Facebook group.  Their support helps us fund some of our staff and supported our research.  And if you would like to give and get a tax deductible receipt within the United States, you can also give through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation.  And we have those links in the podcast notes.  Also please remember one of the problems with relying on podcasts and social media, et cetera, is that they platforms can all be taken from us.  Algorithms can change.  We can suddenly lose you.  And so if you are following me on one social media platform, will you follow me on another this week?  If you’re following me on Instagram, follow me on Threads too or on Substack or on Bluesky or on YouTube.  Our YouTube is really growing. And we get several thousand people watching this podcast on YouTube every week by video.  Because that way even if one algorithm changes, you can still find me somewhere else.  And, of course, sign up for our newsletter list.  It makes such a difference.  And so now, without further ado, I’m going to bring on Aimee Byrd.  I am so thrilled to have my friend, Aimee Byrd, on the podcast again.  Hello, Aimee.

Aimee: Hi, Sheila.  It’s good to see your face and to be able to talk with you again.

Sheila: Yeah.  And, Aimee, I don’t know what the right word is.  You’ve achieved notoriety in some places.  But you’ve been controversial, but you’re also so healing.  And you’ve been so brave.  And I think you’ve been such an inspiration to so many women.  For those of you who don’t know Aimee’s story—and we’ll get into some of it more in this podcast.  You stood up for what was right.  You were in a very conservative denomination.  And you were saying, “Hey, I think that we should be discipling women.”  And you wrote books about discipling women.

Aimee: Crazy idea.  

Sheila: Yeah.  I think that women should actually get to learn about God.  And for some reason, people took major offense to this.  And I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered anyone who has undergone the amount of cyber bullying that you did.  

Aimee: By leaders in the church.  That’s the hard part too.  You might expect it from immature people, who call themselves Christians.  But these were pastors and elders.  Name calling, harassing, plotting.  (cross talk)

Sheila: Yeah.  And you tried to do—you tried the whole time to do what was right, to go through proper channels, and they all just turned on you.  

Aimee: Right.

Sheila: And so you found freedom now, and you’re exploring your faith at a much deeper level.  And I love watching your transformation on your discovery.  And so I want to talk about your new book, Saving Face.  And I have to read the subtitle.  I always forget.  I don’t even remember my own subtitles.    

Aimee: I forget my own too.

Sheila: I know.  Okay.  Finding myself, God, and one another outside a defaced church.  And, honestly, this cover is gorgeous for those of you watching on YouTube.  Here.  The cover is gorgeous.

Aimee: I love it.  Yeah.  We hired an artist, Wayne Brezinka, from Nashville.  I mean he made a whole relief, like a 3-D relief of it.  

Sheila: Oh wow.  Do you have it on your wall?

Aimee: I want to buy it.  I’m in the process of moving.  So I can’t really—there’s so many things right now that it’s so hard for me not to get.  Like plants.  More plants.  But our house has just been put on the market, and so I’m like I’ve got to stop until I actually move which I’m not quite sure where we’re going to be.  But yeah.  I want to get my hands on that.  

Sheila: Lovely.  Okay.  Well, Aimee, let’s—you’ve been on the podcast to talk about your book, The Sexual Reformation, which was awesome.    

Aimee: Thank you.

Sheila: And, of course, you’ve written Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.  That’s recovering from.  

Aimee: From.  Still am.  

Sheila: Which is a wonderful book.  The Hope in Our Scars.  And this book is a little bit different.

Aimee: It is.

Sheila: Because it’s—I mean I can describe what I think it’s about.  But it’s a call to vulnerability and authenticity.

Aimee: Yeah.  I really appreciate that you say that.

Sheila: Yeah. With ourselves.  With ourselves, first and foremost, because I think often we hide from ourselves, and that’s what you’re saying.  And then with other people and with God so that we can form a community that’s real and that’s healthy where we can truly show up and encounter Jesus.       

Aimee: First of all, thank you for your endorsement of the book.  And I just love what you said in it where you say that we can never truly know God until we can face the truth about ourselves.  I mean I felt like yep.  You nailed it right there with that endorsement of what I was trying to say.    

Sheila: Yeah.  And it’s lovely.  You were so raw in it.  It must have been scary to write a lot of it.

Aimee: Yeah.  Yeah.  I mean scary but—because it’s so vulnerable.  But it was also an act of freedom.  It was an act of self care even to do that for myself, to put that out because, as you know, when you confront abuse in the church, confront toxicity and all these things, people come to you with their stories out of the woodworks.  And we hold a lot of horrible things that have happened to people in the church.  And so I was hoping that this more creative genre, this more sharing personal journaling, and even showing one way of healing and learning our own secrets through storied memory work, narrative therapy—if I model that, maybe that will help other people then to read it and be—it provokes their own stories and their own memories and their own wrestling with God.  So I’m hoping that this genre, which is a lot more freeing for me.  I think this is the book I’ve always wanted to write really.

Sheila: It’s beautiful.  It’s easy to read, but it would be so much better if people didn’t read it fast but actually tried to process each chapter.  But this isn’t a deep theological work, but it’s a very deep book.  

Aimee: Yeah.  It’s more contemplative. 

Sheila: Yes.  Exactly.  That’s a good way of saying it.  Okay.  So let’s get into it.  So you said this, “We are, in a sense, terrified of our own faces, frightened to discover who we really are and even more to reveal who we really are to others.”  And in a sense, that’s what we do.  We save face, right?  We try to save face.  And you use this metaphor of face and saving face throughout your book.  So can you describe what you mean by that?

Aimee: Yeah.  I mean I think—and Carl Jung really teaches well about this whole idea too that you spend the first part of adulthood putting on a face, putting on a persona that is more really a mask.  You’re not doing that on purpose.  You are trying to present the person that you think God wants you to be, that you want to be, the good version of yourself that—the version of yourself that you want others to see.  And then you eventually really start believing that’s who you are, right?  And then they’re—something happens.  A transition happens.  Maybe it is something like abuse.  Maybe it’s the loss of a loved one.  Maybe it’s a divorce.  Some kind of rupture happens that you can’t keep the gig going any longer.  There’s blessing in that because then you realize, “Oh, okay.  I have this shadow.  I have this other part of myself with the messages that I’ve received from my family, from my culture, from my church, that weren’t okay about me.  I’ve been putting those all in this bag.”  Robert Bly calls it a bag.  A big, black bag that we’re carrying on our backs.  All the things about yourself that you don’t like.  And they could be sinful things, or they could be I’m too sensitive.  Or I’m too much.  Whatever these things are that you’re putting in the bag.  And so the second half of life, during this transition, you have to start opening that bag and looking in that bag and seeing, “Oh, okay.  Why did I stuff that in there again?”  And you start to learn a little bit more about yourself and who you are, and you have to incorporate that then.  And even if they’re sinful things—if we just stuff them in a bag, we’re not doing the work, right?  We’re pretending like we can say, “Oh, this is a sinful part of me.  I’m going to put it in this bag and move on with my life and not do that anymore.”  But it still comes out.  Everything in that bag is still coming out in other ways, and it’s usually in harm to other people.  I went through terrible harm in the church.  And it’s very easy to say, “Okay.  These are the bad guys.  These are the oppressors.  This was terrible, and I am a victim.  And I can move on from that now, but I am the victim.”  That’s true.  But it’s also true that this is an opportunity for me to look at myself and ask some really hard questions like what attracted me to this denomination in the first place.  What attracted me to this church?  What was I getting out of it?  Why didn’t I see all this stuff in this underlying system of theology?  What was I so caught up in here?  How many have been harmed and marginalized in this church that I turned a blind eye to?  Those are hard questions that I have to ask myself then.  And that’s part of finding our own faces.  

Sheila: Yeah.  That’s beautiful.  And you start the book talking about all the different faces that we see and how ultimately—you say, “To look at my face, I have to gaze into your face.”  We can actually only see ourselves through others.

Aimee: It’s such a metaphor that’s so true about the deeper meaning of ourself that we can’t see our own faces.  

Sheila: Yeah.  We can see a mirror, but it’s reversed.  

Aimee: Right.  The one dimension.  I can’t see around it and behind it and how other people see it.  We come into the world.  I kind of open the book saying we come into the world looking for a face looking at our face and delighting in it, right?  That’s how we know that we have meaning.  That’s how we know that we’re loved.  And so we’re always doing this.  We’re always looking for a face that’s delighting in our face.  And I think ultimately it’s because we’re looking for God’s face, and we are longing to see God’s face beholding our face in pure delight.  Then we will know we matter.  Then we will know we are loved.  And I really think that our vocation then is to help one another find our faces in that way, to give that blessing, that benediction that we see in Numbers 6:24-26.  “The Lord bless you and keep you.  The Lord make His face shine upon you.”  I mean we hear this over and over and over again maybe at the end of church, and we’re sent out into the world.  But do we stop and really think about what those words mean?  Why is that the blessing that the Lord’s face will shine on us?  What does that mean?  And that can really point to the beatific vision.  That day.  The promise of where we’re headed.  And we really will see the face of God and Jesus Christ shining on us in all its glory.  But why is it given to us as a benediction?  Maybe it’s because that’s part of our vocation as well.  If God indwells in me in His Holy Spirit and in you, then my showing you in a benediction that it’s good that you are here.  It’s good that you exist.  I’m so happy to be in your presence.  That is, in a sense, a way of the Lord’s face shining upon you.  You get to see that.  That delight.  So I think that’s part of our vocation.

Sheila: That’s beautiful.    

Aimee: Thank you.

Sheila: And as we see ourselves in others, as we shine God’s face on others, a lot of this is just understanding who we are, right?  And that growth.  And you talk early in the book about how when you were first married you were trying to be the good mom.  And this is when you got into this church, right?  And you give all kinds of reasons that you’ve now understood.  Like you said, you were trying to figure out what—why was I attracted to this church in the first place?

Aimee: Right.  I wanted security.  Yeah.  I wanted that certainty.  I wanted the security that I am in the right church.  I came from a divorced home.  My husband came from a divorced home.  And we married young.  I mean I married right out of college.  He was a little older.  But I wanted to do it right.  And I thought, well, one of the things my parent didn’t have was just real connection in our church that we grew up in.  So I wanted to be connected in church, and I wanted to have more theological knowledge than I was raised with.  I wanted to know—I thought maybe the more I know about God—well, and I just had a vigor too.  I wanted to know God more.  But I also thought that would bring me closer to God and to godliness.  And I think I got caught up with this idea that this denomination really promoted that truth is a doctrinal matter.  And that truth is in the certainty that we have to have and this theological precision.  And the more theologically precise we are the closer we are to God and the more sanctified we are.  And then I became very disillusioned when I find these church leaders—so many of them—in my denomination and adjacent ones that were so emotionally immature, spiritually immature.  I have plenty of unbelieving friends, who saw this kind of behavior and thought, “Is this what the church is like?  This is how pastors behave,” because it was very middle school behavior.  The name calling and the fear that they had, the bullying.  This is what children do.  Not sanctified, godly Christians.

Sheila: And this is in the OPC.  What does OPC stand for?

Aimee: So it’s Orthodox Presbyterian Church.  It’s very much like the PCA, which is the Presbyterian Church in America.  But it’s a lot smaller of a denomination and a little more conservative even than the PCA.  

Sheila: Very complementarian.  

Aimee: Very complementarian.  

Sheila: Very complementarian.  

Aimee: And I just realized—yeah.  I thought there was safety and security in that.  And so I did.  I started building the good me.  And boy, she was a beast.  Looking back at these memories, I’m like the self-righteousness that was there, the rigidity that was there—and when I started to critique within my denomination just the resources for women, the way that leaders relate to women in the church, the responsibility to equip women and to integrate us into the theological heart of the church, I had that vigor still but nowhere to put it.  And I’m asking—I wasn’t even asking about leadership at first.  I was asking about discipleship and our value.    

Sheila: And I want people to understand this.  So when you start speaking out and you’ve been doing all of this theological study on your own, you’re really into theology.  You’re a very smart woman.  

Aimee: Oh, thank you.

Sheila: You’re studying a lot.  And you’re saying, “Hey, I’m not asking for women to be pastors.  I’m not asking for women to be elders.  I am just asking that women get to study theology too,” because you’re in this denomination which is valuing theology over anything else.    

Aimee: And you think it would be a gift if a congregant wants those resources and wants to learn more and be a part of the conversation.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And this was seen as threatening.

Aimee: It was a threat.  It was a threat.  At first, it was looked at like, “Oh, this is great.  Aimee is calling for women to have more responsibility as disciples in the church and have better resources.”  I’m invited to cohost a podcast with an academic and a PCA pastor.  And then I’m invited to speak in all these reformed churches on these topics.  Women’s ministry.  Stay in the women’s ministry box.  But throughout those interactions—and a lot of them were academic too.  Academic conferences and things like that that I was invited to.  I made a lot of—what I thought were friends in those circles.  And I really saw my writing as kind of bridging that gap between academic writing that’s up here that nobody is—it doesn’t sound all that interesting in that language, and they’re talking to each other.  But I’m like, “Oh, there’s so many treasures in that, right?  Let’s bring it down to us regular people.”  And so I really tried to serve in that gap there with my own writing.  And each book though was addressing another level, another layer of what I was encountering as a woman in the church which I questioned.  So I was trying to answer questions like why are our resources so bad for women.  Why are we side armed and not part of the heart of the church?  What is the deal with male leaders being so afraid to give a woman a ride or meet her for coffee?  Why are we not treated like human beings but constantly as sexual threats?  I wrote Why Can’t We Be Friends?  What’s our sexuality symbolize?  What is valuable about me being a woman and you being a man?  What story do our bodies tell?  These are the big questions, I think, that were very interesting to me that I wanted to write about.  But I began to see, oh, it’s not only that we’re getting bad resources, which you’re an expert on, Sheila.  But the error in them, the theological error being taught on purpose by this—the biblical manhood and womanhood movement was Trinitarian.  Trinitarian, unorthodox teaching.

Sheila: And I know what you mean by that, but I don’t think most people do.  So let’s talk about the heresy, the eternal subordination of the Son heresy.

Aimee: I mean just to boil it down into basic language and to just make simple as possible.  Eternal subordination of the Son teaches that even though the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are equal in value and personhood that the Son eternally submits to the Father’s authority, which this is against the Nicene Creed.  So it’s unorthodox.

Sheila: And the Nicene Creed was in—what was it?  380 something?

Aimee: Yeah.  And this is what the church has always confessed to.  Say I’m a Christian.  We believe these things in the Nicene Creed.  And then somehow to take that teaching and say, likewise, even the men and women are equal.  In her role, a woman is submissive always to male authority.  And boy, did that play out in some crazy ways in their books, really freaky ways.  Harmful ways.  And so that is what I addressed in Recovering From Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.  But it really was trying to be an invitation, an invitation to something much more rich and beautiful that God is calling us to, I believe. 

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  And in those days, I think it’s interesting you said that this denomination was really all about very rigid thinking and the closer—the more you understood the correct beliefs the closer you would be to God.  And I think that’s one of the big features of so many evangelical churches today in that the way we know whether or not you’re right with Christ is by what you believe, not how you act.  

Aimee: I know.  Or how you love.

Sheila: Yes.  It’s got nothing to do with love, nothing to do with action.  It’s how you vote in the voting—

Aimee: Oh yeah.  Oh yeah.  

Sheila: It’s to make sure that you believe the right doctrines, the right reformed doctrines, et cetera, and that is not what Jesus ever said.  

Aimee: No.  And there’s not a theological test at the end of our life.  I mean come on.  You look over and over again at all the encounters with Jesus and even prophetic encounters with God and all that.  They’re clueless, man.  But He loves them.  And I feel like it is an encounter and that I realize I’m putting my faith in all this doctrinal precision.  I see these leaders, who are supposedly up here with that, who are way down here with basic love, basic maturity.  They can’t handle their own emotions.  And then I realize that I was only looking on the outside of things, right?  This is the outside of things.  I look at life more now—it’s like we’re being made ready.  We have to be made ready for the truth.  We have to be made ready for reality even.  And I think that God is preparing us for this ultimate blessing of seeing His face in Christ.  So He’s giving this lifetime to help one another uncover our own faces and develop a taste for truth.

Sheila: Yeah.  I love that.  

Aimee: Thank you.

Sheila: Your book is not only about what you’ve been going through recently with your denomination—in fact, that’s actually more of a minor part.  

Aimee: A small part.  Yeah.  

Sheila: You talk a lot about your marriage, your childhood, your parents’ divorce, even little snippets from your childhood that you’ve realized were quite instrumental.  The friend that you betrayed when you were 12 that has really sat with you, feeling like you were ugly because you got a really bad haircut.  Little things like this which seem little but they impact the story, the narrative you tell yourself, about yourself that then gets acted out over and over and over again in your life until we claim that story and until we don’t try to shut our face to certain things.    

Aimee: Yeah.  I’m listening to this audiobook right now by Adam Young called Making Sense of Your Story.

Sheila: Yes.  We’re reading it too.  My husband and I are reading a chapter a night.

Aimee: Oh, that’s awesome.  Okay.  You’re making me think of that when you’re talking about these little snippets because he kind of emphasizes that telling your story—it isn’t this overview, the general story of my life kind of thing all summarized with a tidy bow.  But telling your story is really getting to these little stories, these little memories, and they—I learned so much information about myself in what memories I hold, how I tell them, and be able—being able to go back into those memories and look at the pain that that little girl had and maybe—Adam Young kind of calls it vows that we make with ourselves so that we aren’t hurt like that again and how that’s affected my life and to be able to go back and bless the longings that were unmet there.  That it wasn’t wrong for me to want attunement from my mother when I (cross talk) out of this window.  That was a really good thing that that girl needed.  14-year-old Aimee.  And I can mourn with her the lack of it at that time and lament that, but I can also bless her for wanting those things.  Those were good things to want.  So yeah.  I think this is such a good practice to do in friendship, which is why I think I would like my book read in small group ways too because I would love for it to provoke discussions like that.  People sharing their own memories and being able to have other people hold them with them.    

Sheila: Yeah.  Absolutely.  And some of them were really just so apt.  You talked about this one particular, more recent episode where you actually really saw God just in the very every day.  You have a real knack in your book of helping us see how God can show up and how often we just don’t see it.  But there was this rain storm and the parking lot and your son.  And do you want to just tell us that story?   

Aimee: Sure.  Yeah.  It was my son’s senior year in high school.  And it was a Friday, and it was the day of the senior prom.  And it was pouring down raining that morning.  Just really hard-core rain.  It was still dark out when he was leaving for school.  I was drinking my coffee.  And he’s telling me his plans too.  They made reservations at this restaurant a half hour down the road which is a really busy highway that he’s going to have to get on.  As a fairly newish driver, I’m not really happy about it, but he’s also child number three.  And I’ve learned a lot more about being less rigid.  So I’m sitting in there thinking about how my daughters are probably going to complain that I’m even letting him do this because they wouldn’t have been allowed to do that drive then especially in the rain at night.  And so he goes off to school.  And when he goes to school, he leaves on a bus for a half a day to do an art program that he was a part of in another school.  And so he parks his car.  He gets on the bus, and he texts me and says, “I got a low air sensor light come on in my car.  And I looked.  It looks like my tire is losing air.”  I’m like, “Oh man.  Of all days.  In this rain.  And it’s in the morning, and he’s at school.  And it’s prom day.”  So I go, and I tell my husband.  And he’s like, “Well, we better go take a look at it.”  He’s like, “Maybe I can take the tire off now, go to work, and then maybe get out a little early to change his tire or plug it hopefully.  And then he can still do everything normal when he gets back from school himself.”  So I’m like, “Well, I’ll go with you.  I’ll hold the umbrella because it’s totally raining.”  It was.  We get there.  And, of course, we forget his extra key.  I have to go back and get that.  That whole rigamarole.  I get stuck behind all the school buses, come back, and I hold the umbrella.  We pop the trunk, and I mean—teenage boy trunk.  We’re trying to get the spare tire out.  But there’s a tennis racket.  There’s sneakers.  There’s just tons of stuff that we have to get out of the way.  And we get the tire out.  My husband is trying to awkwardly be in a position where he’s going to get as least wet as possible.  He’s a school teacher before he goes to work.  And he does the jack.  He takes the tire off, and he puts the spare on.  And lo and behold, the spare tire is flat.  Can you believe the—what is going on?  So we’re like plan B.  I don't even know what that is yet.  So we drive back home.  He’s like, “I’m going to have to change my clothes,” but we drive home.  And he’s like, “You know what?  I found the hole in the tire,” as he’s getting it out of the truck.  And he’s like, “I’m just going to plug it and go and put it back on his car.  I already called work.  My kids are in special, so it will be fine.”  I’m like oh my gosh.  I can’t even believe this.  So next thing you know our neighbor comes over.  He’s filing the tire with air.  And we’re getting ready to go back again and do the whole thing over and get the wheel on this time.  I’m holding the umbrella again.  His pants are getting soaked.  They were getting soaked just from standing in the rain in the parking lot, much less laying down and changing the tire.  So he gets it on.  And we come back home, and he’s like—obviously, we have to change clothes.  So we have a little giggling session of, “Can you believe that all this is going on right now before school even started and here we are doing this?”  I just share in the story how I make a little—he—when he pulled up before he changed, he’s like, “That made me hungry.  I already ate my lunch.”  And so I’m like just all these little things made me realize this inconvenience revealed, I think, what our marriage was holding in its cisterns that the playfulness that we’re giggling and flirting with each other during this.  When he’s laying down changing the tire, he’s like, “Can you believe we’re doing this?”  And I said, “But you kind of look kind of hot changing a tire in the rain,” stuff like that.  For me after he goes back to work and as I’m reflecting on that, I did feel God showed up there in that parking space to show us—at first, both of us didn’t want to do it, right?  I’m thinking, “I was about to have an empty house and be able to start my writing for the day, and now I’ve got to do all this.”  And my husband had to change his clothes and be late to work.  But we showed up for our son, right?  And he doesn’t even know.  He’s in art class, not even worried about it.  And we’re going through all this stress so that he can have his prom day in the rain.  But it was a joy.  It was a joy to do it and realizing that really made me see God in the whole scene.  And Barbara Brown Taylor says something to the fact—I don’t want to butcher what she says, but that there are—God is so present in all these ordinary moments in life that if we were just listening and looking we should be cracking our shins on altars all over the place of where God’s been.  And I really butchered the way she said it. But she says the cracking our shins on the altars part.  That’s what I was reflecting on then.  I was thinking like, “Oh, if I could put an altar in this parking space right here about how God showed up to let us know how we love one another in our family and the playfulness that we have in doing that,” that was a really nice blessing.

Sheila: That’s beautiful.  And I think that playfulness and the close relationships that you do have with your family is—was so important over the last few years as you’ve been going through these huge transitions.  And as you reflect now looking back, you had all of these other pastors and elders from different churches who made complaints about you, and you were actually put before a court process in the Presbyterian church, and you submitted yourself to that and you went and sat and you weren’t even allowed to defend yourself.

Aimee: No, and you know, it’s also strange because like there weren’t any actual church charges against me, and there were people especially most of my elders trying to help me in this process. And so, they made charges against—I had an actual—one of my elders—it was revealed to me was in this group of men that hated me. And so this affected my local church big time too, and Presbyterian is a form of government, right? So you have elders, and they make up a session, and then—so that’s your local leadership. But then in a regional way, they come—elders in your region come together and make up a presbytery. So if something isn’t resolved in your church, you can take it to the presbytery. And then there’s a national meeting above that, and you know, my—pieces of my case went through all of that which was a two-year process. But this presbytery—regional meeting that my husband and I went to was because the elder that was in that group of mean men, he filed charges against my—our pastor and the rest of the elders for the way that they were handling the situation. So this is all like related to my case, but I’m kind of—it’s sidelined, right, because all these men are fighting with each other about it. It’s so strange. And so, my husband and I came to support our pastor and other elders for trying to do something about this, and our church was in a lot of trouble. Our church was just being turned inside out from it all, and so we were looking for care and good leadership to help us. And in this meeting, I’m referred to by—I’m not allowed to speak, and I’m referred to as “that lady” in the conversation. There were jokes made about me from the man who was in charge. There was laughter. No one said this was out of order. I just saw my agency being completely taken from me, and the way they were speaking about who I am and what kind of person I am and what my writing even says was totally twisted. And here I am in this meeting with all these pastors and elders in my denomination in the region and I’m not seeing Christ here. I’m seeing pastors trying to behave like lawyers and talk for two hours about the Book of Church Order and bending it this way and that way and trying to sound smart and making jokes about me and ha-ha-ha-ha. And there was no Christ. There was no care. It was so strange because it seemed surreal. Not at all what I thought went on these meetings. And when my husband and I got in the car, like we didn’t speak up because A) we weren’t allowed but we thought about just speaking up anyway, but we thought that wouldn’t do well for our pastor and elders who were—the decision was supposed to be made about whether these charges were going to stick against them. And we got in the car and really regretted not speaking up because nobody spoke up for us and—including my pastor or elders. And my husband was like, “I mean what were they going to do? Send us to OPC jail,” because that’s what it seemed like while we were in there. I mean when we got in our car and shut the door, it felt like we were escaping darkness. And the realization of that hit me in my body, just Christ wasn’t in there. As a matter of fact, something much darker was. That was pretty scary.

Sheila: Yeah, especially after you’ve given decades to this denomination.

Aimee: I mean I had been in that one or the PCA—when we moved to Frederick, Maryland, we joined the OPC church, and they’re very similar. But before that, yeah, we were in the PCA so—and much of my speaking and writing had the audience of those two denominations.

Sheila: Right, right. So then over the last few years as you’ve been trying to find a new church, you actually were making yourself sick over it. You know, you broke out in hives.

Aimee: I did.

Sheila: You tried all of these churches, and some of them were so welcoming, but they had no theology. And you were desperate to find a church.

Aimee: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I so badly wanted a community of people to worship with and a place to heal even, and I was really wrestling with God through that because I’m like, “Come on, I’ve been harmed by Your people. Give me some more people. Why is this so hard?” I thought, “Am I crazy?” But in my community too there’s a lot of churches, but I have a lot of friends who are in the same situation like really trying to find a good worship community. And yeah, we’re going to churches where it’s a total gimmick. One had a Pacman scene on the stage because the sermon series was on the Parables of Jesus and 1990s videogames—like what in the world is this? And then another church that seemed to minister pretty well to the hurting. I found out, oh, they don’t even teach on the Old Testament ever. They just don’t see it as relevant. I just thought, “What?” This was at a time when the Song of Songs is like ministering to me in a deep way. You’re missing the juice, people. There were multiple churches like that or so many churches of people that seem like good Christian people but they have their end times view on the website, and it’s like one of their major things. It definitely isn’t in line with what I think is going to happen. Not that I really know what’s going to happen, but that’s a little far out there. And so, I’m just thinking, “Why is this so hard?” And then so many of them just are all about male leadership. And then there’s a good number of Southern Baptist Churches in our area, and some of these pastors I really like and respect, but I could never be part of a denomination that has so many abuse stories that they are not doing anything about. Like why go from one toxic denomination to another? I’m going to be a troublemaker again. And not all of them really uphold—not all of those churches really uphold the degree of male leadership that the denomination is trying to right now, but I’m like, “No, I’m not giving money to this. I’m not going to be part of this.” So right now—

Sheila: But that was stressful, and I think a lot of people listening are like yeah. I’ve been trying to find a healthy church for years.

Aimee: Right, it’s so strange.

Sheila: It’s awful going to a new church every Sunday.

Aimee: Oh, yeah, it’s—especially when you’ve been harmed so much in the church because it’s vulnerable to even go. And then the way it was so public with me, I’m thinking, “Is the pastor going to Google my name? What happens when the pastor Googles Aimee Byrd?” They’ll be like, “Woah. This is a little more than we want to handle.” So I carry that with me in each place that we entered and knowing that okay if we’re going to stay here for a while, I’m going to have to share my story. All of it. So much.

Sheila: It’s hard.

Aimee: Yeah, really hard.

Sheila: And then you finally were told to try this liturgical church that has a female pastor, and you weren’t sure at first.

Aimee: Well, yeah, I had a pastor friend who said, “Have you tried the mainline churches?” because I’m saying how Christ just seems to be absent from so many of these churches, and he’s like, “You might not be in line with all the doctrine there, but you know you’re going to get Christ in the liturgy.” And so we went to this Methodist church that’s right down the road, and yeah, a woman pastor and—I was kind of afraid to do that because of all my accusers. I knew what they were going to say. Those voices are in your head. “I knew it. This is what Aimee’s goal was the whole time. Told you so.” Blah-blah-blah. But I just got to get them out, get them out of my head, and not care about all the things said about me, and really examine what my own beliefs are in that now. It was time to really look at it, and what a beautiful picture I was given in that church of the pastor was on maternity leave when we went, and yet I saw this church that was run really well without her. I thought okay well there’s not a power issue here. Like these people can have church without the pastor here, and everything is like a well-oiled machine still. So we thought we’ll stick around. The pastor took a three-month maternity leave so I thought she’s got the confidence in this church and to be gone for three months—

Sheila: I have to just pause here.  I have to just pause here. I find this conversation so funny as a Canadian because I can’t imagine anyone ever thinking three months is long.

Aimee: Really? It’s like six weeks here.

Sheila: It’s 12 months minimum. 

Aimee: Really? That’s fabulous.

Sheila: Oh, yeah, we get 12 months maternity leave. You can take it over 18 months just the money is the same. It’s just spread over longer, but you’re guaranteed your job back.

Aimee: Amazing. 

Sheila: Yeah, for you, three months is a long time so continue. I’m sorry.

Aimee: Yeah, six weeks.

Sheila: In six weeks, I couldn’t even walk.

Aimee: I know, right? I mean—

Sheila: I don’t even understand.

Aimee: Yeah. (cross talk)

Sheila: Anyway so three months, she comes back.

Aimee: Yeah, because you know I just think of so many pastors who would be worried that they’re not needed and that they would lose some kind of power by not being there as fast as possible. And so, that was—that meant—that was a message to me. And so the first day she came back, I walk into the church, and I see her. She’s got little baby Wilbur like in a carrier on her chest, and she’s talking to a congregant, and I’m thinking, “I wonder when she’s going to take that baby off of her so she can do her job.” And I watched a woman lead a whole service and preach a sermon with a baby strapped to her chest, and it was the most powerful, beautiful act of God really. I wasn’t distracted as far as the sermon was really good too. And here’s this baby sleeping on her chest, and I thought of the men—all the men whose wives get the children out of the way for them so they can do the important thing of preaching and ministering the Word of God, and I even thought of women throughout history in the cottonfields with babies strapped to them, nursing at the same time, and all the things that women have to do with their children still and how they go together. But this was even different than that because it was choice. Her husband was there. She had a toddler there too. This was her choice. She did that because she wanted to do it, and that was such a powerful message because I think even a good critique of egalitarian churches is that there’s still not—in a lot of the egalitarian churches they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, women can do everything the men can do,” but the unspoken words are, “Just do it like us. Do it the way we do it.” And there's nothing particularly valuable as a contribution as being a woman and doing it. And here I saw that. I saw that loud and clear. It was so beautiful and so powerful. And I thank God for that and many other like things I’m unlearning in that experience.

Sheila: Yeah, and I remember reading your post you wrote about it the very next day. And that post is in the book too. It was on your blog at first and then you put it in the book, and it was lovely. And of course, the internet blew up because here is Aimee going to a church with a female pastor. And you felt terrible because you thought this is all going to come back on her.

Aimee: Right, because a journalist actually—I didn’t share the name of the church or anything like that. And I did check before I made that post. I checked with the pastor if it was okay to use her name or not, like maybe I should use a different name. She was like, “No.” She goes, “This post—this actually means a lot to me.” She said she had just had a situation where she was disinvited from a conference because she said she would be taking her baby, and so, it came at a good time for her to read the power of that message. And so then I was like—so I post it. And this journalist did her research to figure out what Methodist churches where I live and started digging up the website and the name of the pastor and took pictures from the website of this pastor with her children and put it in her article and shamed this pastor like she’s going to hell. And I just thought, “Oh my gosh, here I’ve done it again,” because my critics, my haters I should say, they don’t just punish me. They punish the places I go to. They punish people who host me. And so I felt like I just hurled and unloaded all the Aimee shame on this poor, innocent church and those beautiful children of my pastor.

Sheila: I want to read—this is a longer excerpt. This is a paragraph you wrote about what happened afterwards and you said, “I was still working up the courage to tell her—like your pastor—as I drove my son back to college that Monday morning. That’s when the text came from Katie. Her colleague saw it on social media, and Katie was checking in to see how I was doing. She told me she talked to one of the church’s lay ministers just in case the need to handle some internet trolls and asked the lay minister to pray for me and for her too. Then Katie shared something the lay minister said that if I’m hurting, they’re all hurting because that’s what it means to be the church.” I loved that. That was their reaction is let me care for Aimee.

Aimee: It was so healing because it was just not the reaction I got when I was in the other—the OPC and all of these horrible things were being said about me. I felt very isolated the whole time. So for her to offer that care to me before I even could muster the courage to tell her how she’s being shamed on the internet—yeah, it was kind of like a do over in some ways for my brain neural pathways of what happens when people come after you. It’s not always the story of ineptitude of leadership or cowardliness or so many other things but of actually moving in for care. She’s not trying to get back at this woman—this journalist—those kind of things. She just wanted to minister to me.

Sheila: Yeah, that’s so beautiful. I ended up in a—I landed at an Anglican Church after all of the hubbub that I caused in other churches too. It’s been so healing because my priest—my Anglican priest—loves what we do. He has no idea about evangelical culture. He’s always asking me things like what does every man’s battle mean? What is every man’s battle? He doesn’t know. He’s always asking me to decode evangelicalism for him, or he’ll say, “Why do people think I’m not saved, Sheila?” and things like this. But he follows me on social media and on Sundays he’ll ask—he’ll make reference to something that I wrote that week, and that church threw a party for us.

Aimee: Oh my gosh, I love that.

Sheila: Yeah, for our books, and people came from all over. The pastor he was the one who made all the squares, and it was just like so healing.

Aimee: I love that you’re being celebrated for your gift to the church in your own local church.

Sheila: Yeah. I never had that before.

Aimee: Yeah, me neither.

Sheila: Ever. And they’re just so kind, and they’re so thrilled.

Aimee: That’s great. I love to hear that. I love to hear the good stories too. You hear so many bad ones, and to see Christ at work in His church and that there is still hope.

Sheila: Yeah, and there is hope, but it is hard because when you’ve been through all of that ugliness, and I think what’s especially hard is that in your denomination knowing theology was so valued, and so many of these people could quote the Bible left, right, and center. So how do you keep a rich relationship with Scripture when the people who know it look the least like Jesus?

Aimee: Oh, gosh, that’s a tough question because I think that it’s not always the relationship I want with Scripture. I mentioned that the Song of Songs really ministered deeply to me, and that is because I had to step away from the didactic texts and go to the poetry. And that’s in Scripture too. I love it. Right in the middle of the Bible is this book that is an allegory of Christ’s love for His people, and funny thing, the woman who represents His people and His temple really—His dwelling place—her voice is dominant in the Song. And it opens the Song, and it closes the Song. And she just bursts onto the scene completely immodest, naming her desires, and she also names her abuse. There’s two night scenes. There’s two times where she’s being abused and neglected by the leaders, and she’s saying it. She doesn’t know where her lover is. She cannot find him. Man, I can identify with that. I can identify with that. I think that poetry and metaphor and allegory does something that these prepositional statements of doctrine cannot do. It stirs up our longings, and it directs our desires, and it ignites something in us like I’m seeing and even feeling like I’m participating in beauty. And it’s showing me what my hope is. There’s a picture there where—I’m like I can talk this way to God the way this woman is talking, and I can hear the words from the man as Christ’s words to me. You are beautiful, altogether beautiful, my love. There is no spot in you. Like I long to hear those words. And he says to her to come out of the clefts of the rock. Let me see your face. Let me hear your voice because your face is lovely, and your voice is sweet. Well, that’s opposite of what I heard in the church so that is beautiful. I just think that Christianity is more than a moral matter. It’s a mystical matter too. We are spiritual people. We believe in a spirit realm. We believe that the Holy Spirit dwells in us. That was a mystical matter as well. And so I think the parts of Scripture like the Song of Songs—like the Psalms. And even Lamentations—that helps us get more of a picture of that spiritual realm and that’s really what I needed. That’s the salve that I needed. It brought me back to my face too because in my teenage years I was—I loved reading the mystics and the contemplatives, and somewhere along the line when I was learning more, I was given the message that’s not okay. That’s not proper. And now I’m like, there was a reason why I loved all that because it’s in Scripture. It’s in Scripture so sometimes I spent so long on the doctrinal parts that the narratives and the poetry and even some of the painful stuff like in Judges. 

Sheila: Yeah, I wanted to bring that up because your take on that story of the concubine is so—I think people need to hear it. It’s so rich.

Aimee: Well, I had like the end of each part in the book. I think there’s five parts. I have this kind of vignette of looking at a section of Scripture from maybe a different perspective, and so I’m looking at this concubine that the Levite—she runs away at first, and he goes after her to her father’s house. And it’s the men having the conversation about the terms of her reuniting with him. And he’s traveling with her, and the men come to the door. And this is such a similar parallel to another story in the Old Testament, and they’re demanding that the male guest come out to rape basically. And instead they throw the concubine instead of themselves. In place of themselves, they throw the concubine to be raped all night long. She doesn’t have a voice in the whole narrative, and it’s told that way for a reason. We’re to notice this, and that is—that stirs us up in a different way. She—I guess they give up on her, and she crawls her way back to the threshold of the door as her master is opening it. And he’s ready to leave. He doesn’t even think, “I’ll see her again,” and there she is at the threshold. And you don’t know at this point if she’s dead or alive. He just says, “Get up.” And he puts her on a donkey of all things which I find really interesting because later who do we see on a donkey. He puts her on a donkey back home, and he’s so mad at the tribe of Benjamin for taking his property and doing this that he cuts her up into 12 pieces—a Levite who’s trained in sacrifice—again sacrifices this woman, cuts her up in 12 pieces and sends her to the tribes to start this kind of war with the tribe of Benjamin. So yeah, I talk about the story and the lack of her voice, and the parallels in the story of Christ even, her body was given for many—many, many women then were taking as a result in this war and given back as wives to the tribe of Benjamin. I mean this is horrible. It’s a horrible story, and there’s just nothing redeeming in it when you're looking at it. So I wanted to sit with it and why that story is told in Scripture, and I don’t want to give it all away, but I’ve never heard real preaching on that. I might have heard it skimmed over, but I’ve never really heard preaching that sits with that—the horror—and I think it’s definitely a story of turning your eyes from God and how we treat our women I think reveals what we believe our ultimate hope is in the end because of what women symbolize as the Bride of Christ and the temple of God. How we treat our women now shows what we really believe about where we’re going and headed.

Sheila: Yeah, I think that’s so true. And so often, women—their voice is taken from them. Even our names are taken from us.

Aimee: That’s right. Her name. She has no name.

Sheila: We’re just nameless in history, and yet, we’re not nameless to God.

Aimee: It’s still recorded in Scripture.

Sheila: God sees our faces.

Aimee: There it is for us to be in horror over.

Sheila: Yeah.

Aimee: That’s what I love in ending this talk too, Sheila, is about saving face. We don’t—God doesn’t save face in the idiom sense of trying to cover up and make a persona for His people and for Himself. I mean we look at these stories in Scripture, and it’s the good, bad, and the really ugly is shown in there about His people. And so what do we do with that? I find that glorious too that it’s kind of like a triple entendre the title because we save face in this bad way. We try to cover our own embarrassment. We make these personas that we want to present with a false goodness, and I think the work that I’m doing in this book is kind of modeling how we can save our real faces. It takes work and humility and rawness, but that actually is saving our faces, but it all ultimately leads to that saving face Jesus Christ. And so that’s what I like about the title of the book is that it looks at all that too.

Sheila: Yeah, I love that. I’m going to read something from the very end. “Mostly I want little Aimee to dig up her secrets. We don’t think we can look too closely at them, and we certainly cannot speak them, but they keep us stuck. Jesus is hanging out in our secrets waiting for us. Getting to them is as simple as paying attention to those nagging thoughts and sensations that we try to distract ourselves from and to consider what it is we really want. Children are so good at this because they know how important it is when they make friends. They want to know about their new companions’ favorites and fears, and we need to keep asking these questions too.” I love how your book takes us through that process, and how as we understand each other, as we do save our own face, we’re often able to see the saving face of Christ so much brighter because we’re not focused on hiding anymore.

Aimee: Yeah, there He is. There He is in the parking lot at Brunswick High School in the pouring down rain.

Sheila: Yeah, that’s lovely, and for those of us who have been hurt by the church, I think that idea that God can be in those small moments and that we don’t need to paper over the bad stuff that the church has done or the bad stuff that these men have done because God doesn’t paper over it.

Aimee: He doesn’t. He doesn’t. He doesn’t need our PR.

Sheila: Yeah, and I love that. And your book ends with an invitation of let me see your face and asking how are you telling your story and what conversation are you having and what would it look like to you if the church really did engage in this? What kind of community would we have?

Aimee: Yeah, I think that we would have a place that we could go to and share our stories. Of all places shouldn’t church be the one where we can bring our whole self? Where we can show up as our whole self? Even now, I sit in the public prayer request part of the worship service and people are sharing about cancer and foot surgery and the beginning of school. These are things that we want people to pray about, but nobody is raising their hands and saying, “I’m struggling in my marriage,” or, “I’m really feeling a lull in my spiritual life right now,” or, “I’m feeling lonely.” None of that. Nobody shares anything like personal about themselves. They’re stories. We don’t share our stories, and I know like we don’t want to overshare in worship service, but for church to nurture that. I found in the denomination I was in that if you share that stuff, it’s weaponized against you. How awful is that. So you might not be able to do that with everybody in church, but to foster where you have like communities of friendships there of people that are safe of people that are story holders. They will examine that with you then so that they can know you better and in them knowing you better, you’re knowing yourself better. You’re making a friendship. My story is going to provoke their own stories, and then that all gets woven into the story—the grand metanarrative, and we see Christ working in us in that way. And that is I think what the finding our faces is all about.

Sheila: Yeah, I love that. Well, the book again is Saving Face by Aimee Byrd, and Aimee spells her name like Taylor Swift does in Thank You, Aimee. A-I-M-E-E. I will put a link to Saving Face in the podcast notes. And I—you have a Substack. Did you move to Substack? You’re on Substack, right?

Aimee: Yeah, it’s called Byrd in your Box.

Sheila: Byrd in your Box. That’s right. I get so confused. 

Aimee: I know. I know.

Sheila: I’ll put a link to that as well too. So thank you, Aimee, for being here.

Aimee: Oh, I love talking to you, Sheila. Thanks for having me.

Sheila: One of the big blessings that I have had in doing this work online is that I have just met some amazing people who give me faith in the church, who give me faith—and renew my faith in God because I see Jesus in them, and Aimee Byrd is one of them. So please get—take a look at her book Saving Face. We’ve got it linked in our podcast notes. And thank you for showing up here at Bare Marriage every week. I appreciate those who listen to our podcast, who send me encouraging notes. I got to note last week from a guy in Alabama, a 20-year-old guy in Alabama after our Al Mohler podcast just saying that the words that we speak are encouraging him to be a better man and showing him what it means to be a Jesus-loving guy in this society. It’s like wow that is awesome. So thank you for these notes. Thank you for your encouragement, and thank you for showing up at Bare Marriage every week. Please wherever you watch this podcast, listen to this podcast, rate us five stars. Give us a good review. You can also review our books. The Marriage you Want, Great Sex Rescue. It just helps other people to find us, and that’s really the key isn’t it? Let’s find each other. Let’s be authentic. Let’s be vulnerable, and let’s build real community where people can find help and healing. So thank you to Aimee Byrd. Thank you for everyone who listens to Bare Marriage, and see you again next week. Bye bye.